If you ever actually want to do this, be aware that it's not only unethical, but possibly illegal. Requiring candidates to play a game discriminates against people with visual impairments, who can't play games, but can code as well as anyone else.
Technical interview methods pale in comparison to playing Factorio with someone
91–100 of 358 posts
Re: Technical interview methods pale in comparison to playing Factorio with someone
#924 hours would be a long job interview. Has anybody ever played less than 4hr of factorio?
Yeah, Nefrums would pass the interview in less than 2 hours..
Re: Technical interview methods pale in comparison to playing Factorio with someone
#93[deleted]
Re: Technical interview methods pale in comparison to playing Factorio with someone
#94Click-Bait title, and judging by comments here everyone went for the click-bait. The author doesn't actually use factorio for interviewing, and thinks it world be a bad idea to do so. A more accurate title would be "Comparison between Factorio and Software Engineering Concepts" - but that wouldn't have gotten it to the top of HN so fast, nor gotten so many comments so quickly.
I believe we may be at a point where it is understood that headlines are created with the goal of attracting readers to the article, and it may no longer be necessary to point this out for each article we come across.
What’s the limit? What if I write an article with a title like “Breaking: Google to deprecate its search engine, will get into selling beanie babies instead” but in reality the article is about the many different types of mayonnaise one can buy? I think it’s reasonable to expect the title to somewhat reflect the content of the article.
Re: Technical interview methods pale in comparison to playing Factorio with someone
#95This winter break I spent an embarrassing amount of time on Satisfactory on Steam, which is essentially a nicer (and probably easier) modern refresh of Factorio. While I played, I came to similar conclusions to the article. Building factories in this game is very very similar conceptually to building software. I ran into exactly the same problems that I ran while I build software like: - If I don't plan ahead enough…
The major difference between Factorio and software is you can't refactor in Factorio. Your options are to spaghetti or start fresh. You can't really pick and choose good pieces of your layout because of physical restrictions and the game is a giant math equation, and you want inputs to match outputs at every step of the way - if you don't have the space to do this you don't have the space.
It's like if in the software world you could greenfield, waterfall, or spaghetti. There is no agile in Factorio, which is broadly accepted as most commonly the best way to develop a piece of software.
Re: Technical interview methods pale in comparison to playing Factorio with someone
#96I seriously think that "personal projects" are very underrated when it comes to hiring. If I see that someone has a lot of personal projects and has lots of time in Factorio they probably know how to code. I'm not sure you can rank them as Junior/Senior too effectively as these two things don't require much leadership, but you can basically skip the trivial phone interview questions at this point.
Looking at personal projects biases against people who don’t want to or can’t do them, either contractually or due to time/energy constraints.
Re: Technical interview methods pale in comparison to playing Factorio with someone
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Saying satisfactory is a nicer factorio is ignoring everything that makes factorio a good game.
As someone who has played a bunch of Factorio but only heard about Satisfactory: Can you elaborate on that?
Factorio is (kind of) infinitely scalable. There is no max map size, and the game engine's performance is so incredibly good that it can support absolutely insanely massive factories. You can go as big as you can imagine, and the game will keep up.
It's also ridiculously stable, in the ~thousand hours I've played I've never had a crash or a game breaking bug.
Meanwhile satisfactory puts you on a fixed-size map and will slow down to a crawl once you build too much. This limits a lot of the things you can do in the game.
Re: Technical interview methods pale in comparison to playing Factorio with someone
#98I test my developers in Counter Strike to see if they have a backbone, teamwork and can control rage.
Re: Technical interview methods pale in comparison to playing Factorio with someone
#99This winter break I spent an embarrassing amount of time on Satisfactory on Steam, which is essentially a nicer (and probably easier) modern refresh of Factorio. While I played, I came to similar conclusions to the article. Building factories in this game is very very similar conceptually to building software. I ran into exactly the same problems that I ran while I build software like: - If I don't plan ahead enough…
Also dipped my toes into Satisfactory this winter - after spending over 2,000 hours in Factorio. Games like these challenge your ability to manage complex systems. Remembering which parts of your system processes which data (aka, "materials"). Finding and addressing bottlenecks in production lines. Maintaining and upgrading components, while creating new production lines using the techniques you learn. Managing time…
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Re: Technical interview methods pale in comparison to playing Factorio with someone
#100This winter break I spent an embarrassing amount of time on Satisfactory on Steam, which is essentially a nicer (and probably easier) modern refresh of Factorio. While I played, I came to similar conclusions to the article. Building factories in this game is very very similar conceptually to building software. I ran into exactly the same problems that I ran while I build software like: - If I don't plan ahead enough…
The major difference between Factorio and software is you can't refactor in Factorio. Your options are to spaghetti or start fresh. You can't really pick and choose good pieces of your layout because of physical restrictions and the game is a giant math equation, and you want inputs to match outputs at every step of the way - if you don't have the space to do this you don't have the space. It's like if in the softwar…
But you can refactor... you can clear away everything and you get back 100% of materials